


Battle Scars

by somnatic



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Kissing, bruises mention, it's fluffy I swear, mild Self-harm, scar mentions, self hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-27 06:39:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8391118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somnatic/pseuds/somnatic
Summary: It was supposed to be just a party.





	

She doesn't really think about it.

It's New Year’s Eve, after all.

Her mother is desperate for an occasion worthy of throwing a party. It's about as tasteful as New Year's Eve gets; silver streamers hang from every doorway and window, fresh red flowers drip from vases on every table, champagne is served in real glass flutes. 

Unlike most of her parties, her mother keeps it small. She invites the Stilinskis and the McCalls, of course, and an invite is even sent to the Yukimuras, although no one answered. Malia spent fifteen minutes engaged in small talk around the sausage plate before leaving again. Liam, Hayden, and Mason claim to have other plans. Lydia doesn't mind keeping it small.

Everything's good, for awhile. 

The sheriff helps her mother lay out food beforehand, flirting and laughing all the while. Melissa arrives toting several plates of mouthwatering brownies and actually wearing a dress. Lydia can't remember the last time she saw Melissa without scrubs and neither can anyone else, apparently.

Scott charms the pants off of Aunt Carmen, who squeezes his cheeks and says, "Lydia, what nice boys you're friends with!"

Lydia hasn't had a party like this in forever. She helps her mother gather up abandoned champagne glasses and identifies their owners using the shade of lipstick curled around the edges. 

She doesn't see Stiles that often. He bobs from place to place- talking to Scott on the couch, laughing with her mother by the television, moving trains on the rug with some of her younger cousins. She's busy, he's busy; no one thinks anything of it.

She finds herself lost in the energy of it all. She and the sheriff begin to make running jokes about how drunk Aunt Carmen will be by the end of it. Melissa sends her passing comments about how lovely Lydia looks as she edges her way into the kitchen. Scott gives her a hug by the doorway and for once it is easy, friendly, lighter than any contact previous, not hanging with the darkness of what she had gone through. 

It all crumbles towards the end, though. Melissa and Scott had headed home early, Scott laughing about having to drive his mother home after having one too many flutes of champagne with the sheriff. All that is left is her cousins and the Stilinski family, both of whom agreed to stay back and clean up. 

Lydia has to clamber onto a kitchen stool to begin gathering the silver streamers from their taped positions on the ceiling. As she reaches for them, the stomach of her cropped maroon sweater rides up so gently she doesn't even notice it.

"My goodness, Lydia, what's that on your stomach?" Lydia's hand shoots down to her shirt and pulls it down as far as she can. Aunt Carmen doesn't stop as she drunkenly cackles. "You have more stretch marks than I do, and I gave birth to five kids!"

Lydia starts blinking away tears as her mother steers Aunt Carmen away. Lydia wants to scream about how they aren't stretch marks, but she stays silent and rips the rest of the streamers down.

She excuses herself after that. Aunt Carmen gives her a boozy goodbye kiss on the cheek and pinches her ass in a fond goodbye, reminding her to stay cheeky. Lydia hugs each of her cousins and says goodnight, squeezes the hand her mother offers knowingly and disappears upstairs.

The second her door is shut, Lydia tears off her sweater.

She's left alone, alone, alone. The stain of her crimson lace bra spills across her chest. She stands before her mirror and she watches what happens before her.

She used to know how gorgeous she was. Other girls could not stop commenting on her naturally strawberry blonde curls and her perfectly pouted lips. She used to know she had been blessed with perfectly straight teeth and a good complexion. She used to know how badly everyone wanted to be her.

Her curls drip across her shoulders now. Her lip gloss has rubbed off throughout the night, leaving a faint stain of cherry color. Her eyeliner is smudged at the corners. She looks messy, off-centered.

Her eyes trail down, over the bra and down to her stomach, to where it all goes wrong.

She's been ripped apart and sewn back together half a dozen times. Foundation is usually strong enough to cover the strangle marks on her neck from the darach and to conceal the claw marks draping along the side of her jugular. 

Down here, nothing hides from the eye. 

The memory of Peter's claw marks is branded just below her ribcage, two years of time has reduced the scars to uneven shades of brown that are stark against the porcelain.

One of her least favorite memories of her time in Eichen House was the needles. They used her thigh and arm for a lot of it, but sometimes they would strap her down extra tight and pinch needles into the skin above her hipbones. Bruises blossomed there and wouldn't fade for weeks. The areas still felt as if they held the tinge of soreness as she draped her fingers across the area where the needled slipped beneath her skin.

The worst part was where Tracy had left her mark.

The scar was thick. It ripped across her stomach and still felt as if it had yet to close. The skin was mottled in different shades of blue and purple, and she could feel the bumps of her still healing skin as she traced her fingers over it, as delicate as a butterfly's wing. It felt as if not a single inch of her stomach had been left untouched by this. 

It's one of those moments that she remembers in a crystalline, jarring clarity. Tracy's tail had split her skin as easily as if it was paper. Pain and terror had wrenched through her. It felt as if her heart had stopped in her chest, as her fingers went numb and she folded into the wall.

 

It kind of flashes from there. One moment she’s hunched into herself, watching in horror as her sweater is transformed from pastel pink to a sudden, frightfully dark scarlet color. The next moment, she’s on the ground and Theo is above her, saving her life. A second after that Stiles is in the doorway and all she can think of is whether or not he’s having a panic attack as she watches his chest shallowly rise and fall.

 

She hates her new skin.

 

Jackson used to love her stomach. He would kiss up her hips and over her torso, liked to spread his palm over the flat surface when he kissed her. 

 

Aiden ignored her stomach. He was straightforward; he wasted no time to go from kissing to something much more serious.

 

Her torso used to be beautiful. The skin stretched over muscles that were lean from weekly workouts with her mother. She was slender and the skin was creamy and pale and there were girls in the gym class locker room who hated her for it.

 

She doesn’t change in the gym class locker room anymore.

 

She wonders, as she looks upon herself, if those girls would still be envious of her strawberry hair or her ambivalent eyes if they knew what lies below her outfits.

 

Lydia finds herself wondering if she could tear it away. Wondering if, had she tried hard enough, she could find fresh skin beneath the layers of discolored cuts.

 

Lydia finds herself wondering if she’s had too much champagne, but she tries anyway.

 

Her fingers begin to scratch, trying to peel at the edges. She starts with the cuts below her ribs first, because starting with Peter just seems fitting. He was the one who started to tarnish her in the first place, was he not?

 

Shallow cuts begin to bead up beneath her nails. The cuts still stand out, disgusting and brown, even more so now as they are surrounded by flaming skin. Some of her manicure chips off because of how hard she wants to change.

 

She doesn’t see the door opening as she moves on to where Tracy tore her up. 

 

This hurts more. It’s still badly bruised and not healed all the way. 

 

Lydia has brief flashbacks to her mother tweezing her eyebrows in the bathroom mirror and reminding her that beauty is pain.

 

Lydia keeps going.

 

This one takes less time to start peeling and bleeding. The areas that aren’t already violet with bruises are quick to inflame, burning more and more the faster she goes.

 

Her eyes are blurry with tears.

 

She wonders if this is what her mother meant.

 

Suddenly there are hands over hers, hindering her from her project. She’s quick to snap her head around, trying to figure out who was encasing her from behind.

 

“Lyds, Lydia, what are you doing?” Stiles’s voice sounds like the ones that have been in her head this whole time.

 

His hands are tight over hers, his thumbs rubbing circles on her palms. His arms wrap around hers as if he’s a shield. 

 

She wonders if he’s shielding her from herself, or if he’s shielding everything else from her.

 

She’s a wrecking ball. 

 

She doesn’t know how long she’s been crying.

 

She doesn’t know the difference between when she stopped caring about Stiles seeing her in her bra because she was exposed and when she started caring about Stiles seeing her in her bra because of the ugliness that bloomed across her stomach.

 

Stiles is turning her now. He’s gentle, making soft shushing noises. His hands are ever so tentative as they align on her spine, pulling her into him. 

 

The voices of her hatred have gone silent, for now. All that is left is the sound of Stiles’s heart beating beneath her ear and the whispers of her name emitted from the brunette boy.

 

She stops heaving after a few minutes. She feels as if there are spirits curling in her stomach, volatile and angry, hissing snakes of hatred and disgust just waiting to strike at her once more.

 

Stiles helps Lydia to her bed. She feels cold and drunk. She’s not sure how it got to this point.

 

Stiles disappears into the bathroom. Lydia stares at what’s she’s achieved.

 

Nail marks burn across her stomach. Shallow cuts decorate the edges of her irritated cuts. She hurts all over, and she still hasn’t made much change.

 

Stiles returns with a water bottle, a few bandaids for the worst of the cuts, and the cream that the doctors have given her to help heal the Tracy injury.

 

He has to physically remove Lydia’s arms from hiding the source of her hatred. Her heart picks up the pace as she realizes that Stiles is the first boy who will see her new skin. She loathes the feeling.

 

Stiles sucks in a sharp breath at the sight of her, exposed before him. Lydia shuts her eyes and winces. “Oh, Lydia,” the timbre of his voice is low, careful, as if approaching a fearful animal.

 

Lydia’s starting to think that she might be something more akin to a fearful animal than the strong wolves of her friends. 

 

Stiles goes to work, handing her the water bottle as he cleans her up. He uses the antibacterial cream on the edges of the hardly healed injuries. Lydia feels the silence in her bones, crawling over her skin, biting down on her mouth.

 

Stiles’s hands are gentle, his lip sucked into his mouth as he cleans her up. Lydia drinks from the cold bottle and finds that everything becomes a little less hazy.

 

Stiles clambers onto the bed with her when he’s done. She swigs more from the bottle.

 

“Lydia,” his voice is dark as he stares at her. “Lydia, look at me.”

 

She sighs, still not saying a word as she turns to face him on the bed. She pretends she doesn’t notice the way Stiles is purposefully not looking as she stretches back into the pillows, still only in her bra and black jeans. 

 

“I’m just trying to understand why you would do this, Lyds.” She glances up and his eyes look almost watery. “Why are you trying to hurt yourself? I know about that stuff that Aunt Carmen said in the kitchen and yeah, it’s totally messed up, but she was completely drunk and everyone knew it. I mean-”

 

Lydia cut him off. “Because I wanted to be beautiful again! Because I have layers and layers of new skin growing on my body, trying to seal up the old skin, trying to take away what I used to be when I was beautiful. You know what I was like back when I was beautiful. You remember. I was happy, confident. Allison was still alive, I had no idea that Scott was a werewolf, Jackson still loved me.” Her voice got sober. “You still loved me.” 

 

“That’s what this is about? Feeling beautiful?” Stiles looked determined. “Do you want to know what beautiful is? Beautiful is what you were when you fought for your friends, when you got those scars because you were trying to save us all. It’s not ugly that you got caught in the crossfire and it’s not ugly that you took on some of the deadliest villains imaginable. God, Lydia, will you just look at me?”

 

There’s a flurry of movement and suddenly, Stiles is shirtless before her. She’s never seen him shirtless, but she’s seen him vulnerable before, and this is it.

 

Scars ripple all over his skin. Some of them similar to hers; a jagged claw mark straggles on the skin below his ribs, a thick line curls around his hip. Something frightfully resembling a bullet hole lingers on his abdomen. By his hipbone, she notices something that is worse than the others. 

 

Stiles notices where her eyes catch. “Got that nasty one after junior year.” His eyes fall, so that he is no longer making eye contact. “It’s all that is left of the nogitsune.” 

 

The mark of the nogitsune is etched onto the raised skin. It’s a dark purple color, like a bruise the likes of which Lydia had never seen before. Small blue veins branch from it and struggle outwards as if attempting to escape.

 

“Stiles,” she whispers. “That looks like a-”

 

“A burn,” he confirms. “The nogitsune always gets the last word, even if it needs to be branded into my skin.”

 

Stiles tenses up when her hand makes contact with his warm skin. Lydia carefully glances up to make sure it’s okay for her to touch him like this, and one glance at his whiskey eyes confirms it. She notes the flush that is working it’s way down his neck as she traces the Japanese character with her finger.

 

Slowly, her hand slides up, trailing over every single scar she can see. Stiles offers no explanation for them, and she doesn’t ask. 

 

“Am I as ugly as you think you are?” His smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

 

Lydia feels herself go soft. “Oh, no, Stiles. God no.” Her eyes linger on his chiseled shoulders a little too long. “No, please don’t say that.”

 

She isn’t sure how they got this close. Her hand has paused on a copper scar that’s as long as her finger, and somehow his hand has landed on her hip. Their noses are inches from each other, and as she makes eye contact with him, she finds her whole body relaxing.

 

“Stiles-” 

 

Lydia doesn’t get to finish her sentence before they’re kissing. It’s raw, somehow both focused and unfocused at the same time. She hasn’t kissed a boy in a long time, and she isn’t certain how it feels to her.

 

His mouth is soft, and so is his chest beneath her hand. Stiles is warm, so warm, and as the kiss deepens she finds herself crawling closer to get near him. His hands are sliding up her back, mindful of her bra. 

 

Her knees end up opposite his hips as it continues. The kiss is slow, gentle, and Lydia feels the last of her pain from earlier that night seep away.

 

They break apart eventually, both breathing deeply. Lydia tucks her head beneath his neck and presses a kiss to his shoulder.

 

Stiles carefully curls his fingers into the belt loops on her jeans, smiling dizzily as she kisses up his neck. His eyes are shut when she finally makes it back up to his mouth.

 

Lydia slides her hips forward. One of Stiles’s hands has found its way onto the nape of her neck. Lydia feels as if there is energy burning beneath the skin of every place that they connect, she feels as if she is hazy, drunk off of Stiles’s kiss.

 

Slowly, slowly, Stiles moves her back until she’s positioned against the pillows and he breaks the kiss. Thinking he wants to stop, Lydia sits up, but finds his hands gently coaxing her back down again.

 

His mouth connects just below her bra. He embellishes several kisses upon the skin before Lydia realizes he’s kissing the scars from that dark night, long ago, the one where he had found her bloody and beaten in Peter’s arms and had tried to bargain his life for her.

 

He’s careful as he makes contact above her hips, where several mostly faded bruises smudge her skin where the Eichen doctors injected needles. Yet another time and place in which Stiles had found her, Stiles had saved her, Stiles had been the one who was there for her when no one else could be.

 

She’s still healing where the kanima hurt her, so Stiles places a single kiss above the injury before moving up to her neck. She’ll never forget the look on his face when he had rushed into the room, finding her bleeding out on the floor. She will never forget that moment in which she realized that no man in her life had cared about her as much as he did.

 

He ends up at her neck, where their most recent terror had taken it’s shot at injuring. She hadn’t been able to speak for days afterward due to how deep the beast’s claws had dug, and despite treatments to avoid it, had scars that carved into her jugular as result. She remembers Stiles being the first to visit. He had lied to a nurse just to get in, and he held her hand and he promised her that they would work together and make it better.

 

Lydia ran her fingers through his hair.

 

Stiles kissed her again.

**Author's Note:**

> cross posted on wattpad!


End file.
